Danny ChaiI doubt anyone but Henry will read this, if even him, so it’s easier to just address him directly instead of explaining everything. I’m not sure you understand the net neutrality thing. I’m not sure I do either, but I think you understand even less than me, because your whole entry on the subject has pretty much nothing to do with it. People having varying levels of bandwidth usage? Price schemes? Huh?
Tim Berners-Lee has an interesting blog post about it (I love how he starts it: “When I invented the Web…”). But as he states, “Net Neutrality is NOT saying that one shouldn’t pay more money for high quality of service. We always have, and we always will.” Should people have to pay more for more bandwidth usage? Maybe. But it’s completely unrelated to the net neutrality question.
The real issue as I understand it is that ISPs want to be able to preferentially treat their own packets, and that has very little to do with bandwidth concerns, nor would increasing network capacity change anything – history tells us that any time you increase bandwidth, people find a way to use it. So they’d favor their own VoIP packets above 3rd party ones. Or make their own web pages load faster. Or their own media servers.
I’m in favor of net neutrality for a couple reasons. One, I also believe in the power of the market and technological innovation (SN. Moore’s Law only applies to integrated circuits. There are supposedly other laws for other things, like Kryder’s (sp?) Law for hard disks), but this only happens if competition is preserved, and we need net neutrality to maintain that. Without it, each ISP will create their own version of things and there’s less incentive for a 3rd party site / company to innovate. I actually think this is already happening with VoIP – ISPs are rolling out their own versions and shutting out what currently exists. So there’s less incentive for someone to create the next technology after VoIP, if they know they’ll just get shut out in favor of the ISPs own version.
But I mainly support legislation because of the people who are arguing for it – it’s a veritable who’s who of the Internet. I agree that the government in general screws tech legislation up. So do most of these technologists; in general, they’re near anarchists when it comes to government interference. And yet, these same people pretty much all support net neutrality legislation. I don’t know of a single significant technologist who is against it. They may be out there; I just don’t know who they are. Whereas it seems like most of the tech people I respect are in favor of it. That’s pretty significant to me.
Boring.