3 ms·

If net neutrality is coming, so is the end of all-you-can-eat Internet access

• jaysonelliot 16y ago
  This smells an awful lot like a story planted by the telcoms that want to stop net neutrality. Does anyone honestly believe that, were Comcast or Verizon to start metering internet access, no competitor would show up to steal away all their business with an all-you-can-eat plan? History says otherwise.
  • eiji 16y ago
    Well ... if there is any competitor. oligopoly != competition
  • mooism2 16y ago
    This is the problem with the US broadband industry though, isn't it? That in most areas it is a duopoly (incumbent phone company -v- incumbent cable company) with no effective competition.
• pzxc 16y ago
  The argument rests on the assumption that the increase in bandwidth consumption is now and will continue to outpace the decrease in the cost of bandwidth production. I don't know how much cheaper it is to provide a gigabyte of bandwidth today than it was a year ago or a decade ago, and I know that bandwidth consumption is certainly skyrocketing, but if the rest of the technology industry is any indication (where I now pay pennies for CPU cycles that would have cost millions a few decades ago), it may turn out in the end that bandwidth becomes so cheap it doesn't matter how much video a few billion humans watch each day online. On the other hand, if it does turn out to matter how much bandwidth costs, I'd much rather pay for how much I'm using and have equal access across all channels and content types, than to have "unlimited internet" but have to wait for videos to buffer because my ISP says it has lower priority than something else or someBODY else they deem more worthy.