Follow up on Net Neutrality
I saw this article about on reuters regarding a new bill on net neutrality and thought it would be a good follow up to my post on how net neutrality affects you. It looks like the lawmakers involved share my opinion that telephone and cable companies should not be allowed to filter content or manage bandwidth.
Regarding government regulation, Jim Cicconi of AT&T says:
The public would not pay for its Internet services if AT&T discriminated against content
This might be true if consumers had a choice of internet providers, but most do not. If I decided I didn’t like AT&T’s DSL service, my choice would come down to AT&T or no internet. (On another note, maybe I should have quoted someone from Comcast since I do use AT&T DSL). I think most consumers have the same number of choices I do, which is none.
As I said before, broadband internet is a classic case of a natural monopoly. It would be too expensive for every internet provider to lay fiber optic cable to every household, so generally a single provider will lay fiber and service an area. This should be an obvious reason for government to step in and regulate how the companies provide service and how much they can charge.
