3 ms·

"then ISPs are going to pull a Martin Shkreli" So why didn't that happen prior to now? The NN legislation as proposed is new and the internet existed just fine

• Alex3917 10y ago
  > So why didn't that happen prior to now? That's a good question, and it's hard to say. Empirically we can see that it is starting to happen, e.g. with t-mobile not charging users when they consume video and audio data from certain sites. My guess is that the reason it didn't happen historically is because content was worth almost zero. E.g. Flickr was bought by Yahoo for almost nothing, and if I remember correctly YouTube was on track to go bankrupt until Google bought them to set the legal precedent they wanted. It's only in the last couple years that the costs of producing and distributing content have now also basically fallen to zero, so it's now possible to make a lot of money in the content business even if any individual item is still worth very little. There have obviously been companies who have made a lot of money on content previously, but mostly only when there was either some quirky situation affecting the price of display ads (e.g. Yahoo) or else when there was some quirky situation affecting the valuation of the company itself (e.g. YouTube).