Opinion: Absence of net neutrality rules harms consumers

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 15 March 2007 13:03

Your IT - Home IT

You want to use VoIP to cut your phone bill? How long will it be before your carrier artificially slows packets that aren't going through its own VoIP service?

Kids are spending lots of time on YouTube? Quick, whack on a surcharge!

You don't think ISPs with ties to cable or satellite TV operators would like to make it difficult or more expensive for you to use emerging services such as Joost?

There can be no free market in Internet-delivered services without net neutrality.

Advocates of allowing 'tiered service' in place of the current best-effort situation claim that it is necessary to fund additional network capacity. That's hard to believe. Sure, nobody's likely to invest in additional capacity (whether backbone or local) if nobody's going to pay to use it, but people are accustomed to paying more for additional bandwidth.

There may be an expectation that prices will fall over time, and that bandwidth comes with a bulk discount, but consumers expect to pay more for ADSL2+ speeds than they would for regular ADSL. And if a business decides it needs to replace its current 10M link with a 100M connection, it will expect it will come with a bigger price tag.

Whoever provides that 'last mile' (or so) can charge more for extra bandwidth, giving them the ability to pay more for backbone carriage. If there's judged to be sufficient aggregate demand, extra capacity will follow in short order.