I just wanted to call out where you say that it's "hard to prove" that ISPs are purposefully degrading service. Hard to prove in a court of law, perhaps, but t

I just wanted to call out where you say that it's "hard to prove" that ISPs are purposefully degrading service. Hard to prove in a court of law, perhaps, but the speeds of access to the businesses being extorted can tell a pretty convincing story. This chart: http://appledailyreport.com/backend/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Netflix-Comcast-Deal.jpg http://appledailyreport.com/backend/wp-content/uploads/2014/... paints a nice picture of how ISPs want to extort businesses that are in more profitable lines of work: notice how speeds change from before Comcast started trying to extort from Netflix, to during the negotiations, and after Netflix payed their protection money. Level3's article also called this out: the ISPs are purposefully, physically, underprovisioning their connections, because it gives them leverage over companies like Netflix. As to why the internet is different: the internet is not like healthcare. Socialized or not-socialized medicine is obviously not that big of a deal to the future of a nation; both the US and Britain were economically competitive while having very different systems. In contrast, the Internet obviously matters a great deal to the future. And if various players (hollywood; last-mile ISPs) can manage to appoint themselves gatekeepers and engage in rent-seeking behavior on the internet (in the United States, at any rate), well, HN is acutely aware of what that will mean for the future of innovation, and the future of nations as well.