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I haven't thought this completely through perhaps, but I've often thought one extremely simple regulation that might have a lot of good effects would be this:
by jaredklewis 10y ago
I haven't thought this completely through perhaps, but I've often thought one extremely simple regulation that might have a lot of good effects would be this:
ISPs must charge customers per byte transferred. In other words, no all you can eat plans allowed, usage based pricing only. This has the benefit of aligning consumer and ISP goals in the sense that providing fast service allows ISPs to make more money, so they are incentivized to provide high quality service built on high quality infrastructure. If the Internet is not working, they make no money. If it is slow, they make less. On the consumer side, it incentivizes efficient use of bandwidth.
Of course, this is only one piece of the puzzle. The other piece is that most ISPs have a defacto monopoly in their region. Not sure how we can solve this one. This is partially caused by bad decision by municipal governments, industry collusion, and it seems in part by just the nature of running physical utilities to homes and businesses (many regions also have electric, water, sewage, and gas monopolies).
- nosuchthing 10y agoCharging by the byte would disincentive users from exploring the Internet. That effectively kills the Internet as we know it.
- Diamons 10y agoSeriously. It amazes me how ignorant some people are to what the Internet actually is.
- jaredklewis 10y agoWell, sure.I for one think it is great for people to travel to far away places, but I still support charging plane fare based on the distance traveled. Like fuel and clean air, radio spectrum and fiber wires are both physically limited resources and it makes sense to incentivize efficient use of them. You can browse thousands of web pages of text for the same bandwidth cost as 1 HD video. The way we use bandwidth today (animate gifs, ugh) is wasteful and makes everyone's internet more expensive.
- nosuchthing 10y agoThe bandwidth capacity already exists from all the dark fiber installed nearly 20 years ago. The issue is mainly with monopolies and Oligopolies of the ISP and telecoms providers.