Net Neutrality

I have to admit I don't really understand this whole net neutrality debate. As I understand it, the broadband service providers want the ability to enter into special relationships with content providers to prioritize their bandwidth intensive offerings like streaming video. This is needed, so the providers argue, to subsidize the extra infrastructure costs needed to support such offerings.

The net neutrality crowd's concern is that this would result in providers blocking access to sites that don't pay up. But do you really think ISPs would block access to big sites, e.g. Google? That seems pretty crazy. Such an ISP would quickly lose customers. As Randolph May writes, "The marketplace reaction likely would be swift and adverse." It seems to me the worst we consumers could expect is that we would continue getting service at the same level we're getting it now.

I use Road Runner at home. Under the ISP plan, RR would try to cut a deal with, say, Yahoo to build out infrastructure, subsidized by Yahoo, that would deliver high bandwidth Yahoo content to RR customers more efficiently and quickly. That would obviously be a boon to RR users who use a lot of Yahoo content. If Yahoo didn't agree to the deal, then RR would just keep delivering the content they way they do now, which is apparently good enough for a lot of users. Again, if they took the bold step of cutting off that Yahoo content, RR would lose quite a few customers to some other broadband ISP that didn't cut them off. (Admittedly, RR is owned by Time-Warner who has not exactly distinguished themselves over the years in the realm of intelligent business operation.)