[victork2]

In the long run not preserving net neutrality will give a competitive advantages to the big companies. Let's imagine that Microsoft does a lot of lobbying with Comcast and they manage to make Bing Videos not count as part of your network cap whereas Youtube will be limited. Who do you think users that want to preserve their caps will turn to? Now imagine that the same scenario with Google vs a small company that does search with a totally revolutionary technology. Same thing, Google lobbies a lot and they come to an agreement and they add 1000 ms to every request that is not made to Google Search. Again, who do you think will win?

Net neutrality is the safeguard of many things but for entrepreneurs it guarantees they get the same treatment as big companies. In other words what matters most is the quality of your product and not the ties you have with ISP.

It works and guarantee pretty much the same thing as the antitrust laws. Fair competition is a huge source of wealth but requires constant care.

My leitmotif is always: Think about the [negative] externalities!

[spindritf]

> Let's imagine that Microsoft does a lot of lobbying with Comcast and they manage to make Bing Videos not count as part of your network cap whereas Youtube will be limited.

OK, let's imagine MS actually puts their servers in Comast's closets or arranges for some sort of direct connection(s) and it becomes cheaper for Comcast to serve Microsoft's content, now hosted on Comcast's own network or topographically close by. Should Comcast not be allowed to pass (some of) those savings to their customers just because a smaller company couldn't afford to keep their servers with multiple providers?

[X-Istence]

Akamai and other CDN's do exactly this. They buy closet space on the providers networks so that they are extremely close by and on the customers network, not outside of it. Use anycast, and DNS that directs you to the closest site and you are no longer touching the public internet...

Akamai and other CDN's pay for this privilege to Comcast, and Comcast still counts those downloads against the users bandwidth cap...

[markkanof]

That's an interesting way to look at it, but I would frame the issue in a different way. It's unlikely Comcast would pass on the savings to their customers. It's more likely that they would charge their customers more for accessing the other services that are not hosted in their closets. Then that becomes the scenario that so many people are worried about where big companies who can negotiate deals with Comcast have a huge competitive advantage over smaller competitors who might not be able to negotiate the same deals.

[spindritf]

> It's unlikely Comcast would pass on the savings to their customers.

It's not unlikely, actually, the probability is 100% because they just did. Customer's quota didn't change but Xfinity app usage doesn't count against it.

[ajross]

I don't think the idea that a "private" service within the ISP is less expensive is that obvious at all, really. Backbone bandwidth is overbuilt and comparatively cheap. Datacenter space and service management are new costs vs. just letting MS run it on their network.

[crusso]

You can be assured that they're charging for datacenter space and service management -- so that part is a wash... hell, they're probably making a little something on that.

Even if you manage to eliminate all outside telco costs, you're still going to have extra costs setting up a multi-corporate interconnect vs just routing the traffic through your own internal network.

Private service within the ISP is almost always considerably less expensive.

[ajross]

Of course they're charging for it (in this case via a subsidy from Microsoft). But they'd charge for it in either architecture. The argument is that they can get away with discounting it to their customers (i.e. dropping the bandwidth cap) because it's "cheaper".

And I don't entirely buy that, nor have you managed to sell me. You're simply asserting the same stuff without evidence: you think the cost of user-driven bandwidth (to pull content from Microsoft) is higher than managing the infrastructure to host it locally. And I don't see why that's true without numbers to back it up.

[Shanakam4]

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