[devcpp]

>Companies like Comcast have no interest in slowing down web site traffic

Yeah? How about money?

As a comms engineer, I too think about the technical implications of this.

But you have to remember that the people who push for the abolition of net neutrality are mainly the finances guys, i.e the ones responsible for bringing as much money as possible to the company. And when you put yourself in their shoes, all of a sudden you get dreams of Comcast turning the Internet into the same kind of market it has in cable television. And you very quickly forget about QoS, bandwidth, latency and the job of "delivering the bits" and just think in terms of profits. You wouldn't know what most of those terms mean anyway...

[exelius]

Well, in short, any web site with any money to pay the ISPs is likely already running on a CDN that's been paying the ISPs for a decade. The portion of that market that's not yet monetized is likely very small. Besides, slowing down general-purpose web traffic makes it look like your service just totally sucks ass.

But more generally, slow-loading websites make the ISP's service look shitty. There's almost no cost for them to just QoS the low-bandwidth stuff up and it makes people think their service is better.

[orthecreedence]

> But more generally, slow-loading websites make the ISP's service look shitty

Exactly, so people will just leave that ISP and sign up with one that doesn't throttle traffic. Except most people have only one ISP in their area. Yay free market!

[exelius]

Even in a truly free market, most areas would only have one ISP. See how Verizon and AT&T have dramatically scaled back or stopped their FiOS/U-Verse rollout plans. If a company with easements and existing infrastructure (and thus lower costs) has decided it can't justify the investment, how would anyone else?

[orthecreedence]

I was saying "Yay free market" as in "a truly free market is a bad idea as seen by local ISP monopolies," not as in "our free market has failed us and needs to be freer."

In a truly free market, there would be one company that owns everything, including infrastructure. Not a world I'd like to live in.

[randac]

You only need look outside the US to see that's garbage.