| > Netflix and YouTube And multiplayer online games, and others that have been mentioned in this thread, and... The basic error you are making here is to think that the set of applications with these bandwidth requirements is small and easily predictable. It isn't. And it will get less and less so as time goes on. > Why should people who don't use Netflix and YouTube pay for the upgrades that help only users who make use of these things? They shouldn't, and they aren't. They just buy a cheaper, lower bandwidth Internet plan from their ISP. They're doing that already--certainly I am. I don't want or need Netflix so I don't pay Comcast for that level of bandwidth. If your reply is that that money still ends up going to pay for network upgrades that I don't need, first of all, if that were really true, Comcast wouldn't have had to try to charge Netflix for the privilege of faster connections, because, as I said before, they would have actually been using the monopoly rents they've been extracting for the purpose for which they were intended--network upgrades to keep pace with demand. But more importantly, network upgrades that increase aggregate bandwidth benefit everybody, not just Netflix or Youtube users. Except for the "last mile" connection to each individual house (which is not affected by deals like the Comcast-Netflix deal), everybody's traffic travels over the same network, and network upgrades speed up all that traffic. Which is precisely what net neutrality is trying to preserve, and what Comcast charging Netflix for faster connections does not preserve. In other words, your claim that passing the costs on to users will make everyone pay for Netflix will only come true if we allow ISPs to privilege Netflix traffic over other traffic. Otherwise everyone is just paying for increased aggregate bandwidth from which everyone benefits. And if everyone pays just for the bandwidth they need, what's the problem? Everyone then contributes their fair share to keeping up the network that everyone uses. |