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by dalbasal 3110 days ago
Well...if they are treating all traffic equally then the only advantage the ISP has is bundling. That's a marketing advantage, but not a total competition killer. Amazon bundles streaming with free delivery subscriptions.

Not treating traffic equally would mean they could eliminate Netflix as competition for their customers. That's worse. Same for mail, social networking, news, dating etc. Video is just more pertinent in 2017.

The big thing to protect is always categories that don't exist yet.

Competition helps, but infrastructure markets are always suboptimal.

2 comments

It wouldn't give an ISP advantage over other ISPs, but that doesn't matter because ISPs are for the most part regional monopolies. It would give Hulu Plus an advantage over other streaming video services, though.
There aren't marketing advantages in markets who have no other choice for ISP.