[unreal37]

I don't understand the outrage here. Comcast is offering something for free to its customers that other ISP's customers have to pay for. It's good to be a Comcast customer I guess.

A lot of the arguments in the article and even some in this comment thread are "imagine if"... Either something is wrong on its face or its not. You shouldn't have to come up with theoretical examples of Comcast charging for unlimited access to Youtube and Netflix in order to make your point.

My cell phone service by the way (Bell Mobility) offers free unlimited access to Twitter, Facebook and Myspace that don't count against my mobile data plan cap. If you consider that against net neutrality, then net neutrality died a long time ago.

[gioele]

> My cell phone service by the way (Bell Mobility) offers free unlimited access to Twitter, Facebook and Myspace that don't count against my mobile data plan cap. If you consider that against net neutrality, then net neutrality died a long time ago.

How isn't this against Net neutrality? Suppose you run a service that competes against Twitter. With Net neutrality you must prove to the users that your service is better thatn Twitter. Without Net neutrality you must prove to your users that your service is so much better than Twitter that it is worth to pay additional money to the phone company to use it. Or you can pay the phone company to add your service to the number of non-data-cap-eating websites.

In the end the phone company is paid twice: a first time by the users and another time by the websites.

[unreal37]

I'm assuming Facebook, Twitter and Myspace are not paying Bell Mobility anything for this. Essentially, Bell is offering it to customers as a carrot to sign up with them. "We don't charge you for social networking, which we know you will use every day!" sounds catchy to a lot of people.

[gioele]

> I'm assuming Facebook, Twitter and Myspace are not paying Bell Mobility

It is quite likely that they are, see the nice error message you get from http://0.facebook.com . I suppose the deal requires Facebook to pay ISPs; the ISPs are free to offer free access to any site whenever they want and I doubt they are really after a text-only interface.

But this is not the point. The main problem is that all the Facebook competitors will have to pay if they do not want to be relegated in the I-have-to-pay-for-it separate internet.