
Craig Newmark on net neutrality - brett
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/06/09/newmark.internet/index.html
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pg
I was never 100% sure about "net neutrality" (99% maybe) till I read the
opposing view by Mike McCurry. What a blatant piece of hired hackwork. The
side that needs to employ someone to write things like that must be the wrong
side.

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lupin_sansei
I find some of the Cato (Libertarian) arguments against Net Neutrality quite
persuasive:

"There is no evidence that broadband operators are unfairly blocking access to
websites or online services today, and there is no reason to expect them to do
so in the future. No firm or industry has any sort of "bottleneck control"
over or market power in the broadband marketplace; it is very much a
competitive free-for-all, and no one has any idea what the future market will
look like with so many new technologies and operators entering the picture."

<http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-507es.html>

Any Broadband provider who blocks Google will immediately lose all their
customers. And will create a market in "100% Free Content" ISPs. I also think
it's a good thing to be able to choose a hypothetical service where guaranteed
high quality VOIP packets are charged differently from P2P traffic.

There's also the old assumption that business will tend to be evil and
government will tend to be good.

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dfranke
My knee-jerk reaction was to agree with Cato, but the problem is that
broadband isn't a free market. The telcoms have been legislated into
monopolistic conglomerates. The damage caused by those laws is already done;
repealing them now wouldn't help. So, although in a perfect world I'd be in
favor of competing telcoms and against net neutrality laws, a government-
created, government-regulated monopoly is better than a government-created,
unregulated monopoly.

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MobileDigit
Why would repealing laws not help now?

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dfranke
Because the big telcoms already monopolize the infrastructure so no new
startup is going to be able to compete with them head-on.

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lupin_sansei
But repealing the laws would allow them to compete with each other.

------
domp
<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=7416>

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brett
yeah. whoops. didn't realize it was a dupe cause the other one is the
37signals writeup.

