Big Telecom's astroturf campaign against Net Neutrality

[Kptlt. Neuerburg]

[Gargamel]

Originally Posted by propbeanie

Basically, the feds stepped into the internet (which they gave away, btw), and mandate (regulate) that User A (who does 3d work and online gaming from home) gets the same bandwidth on his DSL as User B gets (who only does email and bookface), and User C (who has dial-up internet), gets the same, with User A and User B paying for the upgrade for User C. Equality. Besides the 911 "fees" that are on my phone bill (a good idea), there are all sorts of other federally mandated little "fees" on there (most are bad ideas), for me to help pay for this, that and the other. Then there's those little phone company "fees" that help pay for them to pay the feds, and line their pockets while they're at it...

That's not it at all....

First off, you cannot mandate bandwidth faster than is physically capable. It goes against the laws of physics. You cannot mandate that a dial up line would have the same bandwidth as a fiber line. It just doesn't work that way. If it did, nobody would pay for fiber and we'd all go back to dial up, since we can't speed up dial up, but can slow down fiber.

The bandwidth we are talking about is on the Tcom level. Some sites would pay the Tcom companies a fee to have their data pushed through faster than their competitors.

It's like we would be creating an express lane on the internet highway, but it is only accessible via toll.

So why don't the competitors pay you ask?

Because a lot of the first adopters of the system could easily have exclusivity rights in the bandwidth contracts. They could specify in the contract that all their competitors would not be able to use that tcom companies high speed lanes.

Think it can't happen? Here's a analog: ATT and the iphone. When the iphone was first released, it was exclusively on the ATT network. By contract. So if somebody wanted to use the latest in tech (a certain website lets say), they had to use a very specific provider.