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by cogman10
2442 days ago
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> Regardless, every regulation has a cost to compliance. I don't buy this. Is there a cost to statutes against murder? What about trespassing laws? How about loitering laws? How about road laws, is there a cost to automakers for speed limit compliance? while regulations CAN have costs for compliance (see FDA testing for an extreme example), they don't ALL have costs. NN falls in the low to no cost bucket. "treat all traffic fairly" is a much easier algorithm and maintenance scheme than "Slow down netflix because we are partners with AT&T" or even "Slow down netflix because the user hasn't purchased the fast netflix plan". That is MORE costly to maintain for a network provider, not less. About the only way to spin it as costly is if you talk about opportunity losses (IE, they can have higher profits with shittier plans). I'd be more sympathetic if ISPs hadn't attained regional regulatory capture basically everywhere. If there were true competition in the ISP market then you could sway me to thinking NN could go. However, as it stands, most areas have only 2 competitors. In that case, either we need NN or we needs some trust busting. |
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There absolutely are cost to statutes against trespassing and loitering. Other countries with different laws have more freedom, for instance the “Right to Ramble” in the UK and other countries guarantees citizens the right to pass over privately owned woodlands and fields unmolested by trespassing law.
When it comes to compliance by a company, and not to your examples of statutes against murder, the company is absolutely going to pay lawyers to examine the regulation, promulgate internal rules about how to follow it, employees have to read the regulation, there may be mistakes causing fines to be levied. I don’t see how a regulation as big as net neutrality could not have costs somewhere.
Edit: and slowing down traffic doesn’t have to be a positive decision, YouTube and Netflix were slow on FiOS at one point because they hadn’t upgraded the necessary peering due to a dispute over who should pay for the upgrade. Under a net neutrality scheme, you now have to analyze the regulation to see if it forces the ISP to pay for the upgrade themselves for instance.