| Thanks. Those are decent arguments. But ... > More and more people are getting access to broadband, yet it's still quite expensive. Why isn't that an issue in so many countries, where broadband is widely available, and not all that expensive? > The idea, which you will have to defend against if you ultimately want net neutrality, is that companies could pay for the bandwidth. OK, that works for Netflix. But it increases barriers to market entry, and thus stifles competition. And more generally, it's a regression to pre-Internet walled gardens. > Point being that a lot of people lack broadband because they can't afford the installation cost and that is a big different between Internet access and other utilities which are much more universal. Back in the day, the US had the Rural Electrification Administration. Everyone got access. But they still had to pay for the electricity. So why not for Internet access? Users could pay for some mix of bandwidth and throughput. I mean, when I lease VPS, I typically get either uncapped 100 Mbps uplinks, or 1 Gbps uplinks capped at 1-10 TB/mo. VPS with 1 Gbps uplinks and 5 TB/mo go for about $20/mo. |