| "Comcast is caught throttling bittorent, and instead of switching providers to satellite or Verizon or anything, everything goes to the government and demands regulation on net neutrality." I live in Philadelphia, where the tallest building in the city is the Comcast Center. It's going to be years, if not a decade before I can get FiOS here. The reason Comcast is the only carrier in my area is a result of taking government out of the equation. The big telecom companies don't give back to the government that gives them the tax breaks and concessions that allowed them to become big companies in the first place. At every opportunity they get, they seek to undercut the very country that makes their existence possible. Take Comcast for example. In Pennsylvania, we have special zoning for dilapidated parts of cities and towns that are designed to encourage renewal - Keystone Opportunity Zones. Google 'em for more detail, but essentially, businesses in a KOZ don't have to pay state or local taxes. When Comcast announced it was building their HQ in center city Philly (which, despite the piss smell, is hardly dilapidated) they lobbied HARD to get the zoning changed on their plot of land to a KOZ so that they wouldn't have to pay state or local taxes. Sure, they're bringing in jobs, and those people are taking trains into the city and driving cars into the city, and roads and train tracks totally just maintain themselves. I don't give 'government' a free pass, but I absolutely lean toward government - an entity that arose to further civilization, believe it or not - over corporation, which is entirely selfish. Both can do good and bad, both can be abused. . . . . . . .
My own experience and why I'm pro net-neutrality: For the first few months that I lived in the city, Hulu was a stuttering mess. We have cable internet, which wasn't as fast as the FiOS we had in the suburbs (which was both faster and cheaper), but was by no means so slow that Hulu should have to buffer. YouTube worked fine. Downloads were fine, but Hulu? Couldn't get through a half hour show without three or four pauses to buffer. It took a number of complaints to Comcast, and maybe it had something to do with me whinging on my twitter account with the 8000 followers, but after a number of phone calls, Hulu suddenly worked fine. I can't stand watching cable television, our entertainment center is a Dell Zino HD hooked up to a wall mounted LCD, and we watch Hulu and Netflix almost exclusively. Do you think Comcast are sitting on their thumbs while Hulu eats their lunch? It's not like I can get anything else decent in the city. If they can get away with crap like that, they will. That is why outside regulation needs to step in. |