Etsy CEO to Businesses: If Net Neutrality Perishes, We Will Too

Its odd to talk about net neutrality as something that might "perish" as if it ever existed for more than the couple of years before the FCC's order was struck down.

This is going to draw a lot of negative points here, but its important to note that the issue of net neutrality is an issue because of the lack of competition in the states.

If BT (largest ISP in the UK) tried to pull any of the stuff that's been going on, they would have been fined, and users would have left in droves. All the major ISPs here in the UK have multiple CDN node on the edge of their network, simply because its cheaper and easier to do so.

The other important thing to note about the netflix vs ISP battle is that it is still cheaper to pay the ISP money to install their own CDN than it is to use akamai(who already have CDN blades on the edge).

The problem in the States is that end users have no choice, and there is no working mechanism for imposing fines on companies that are doing anti-competitive things.

So I'd suggest that net neutrality is actually a side show here, the real culprit is monopolies.

An example that I've bumped into, is trying to buy a decent network connection in redwood city. I naively assumed that it would be simple cheap and quick to procure a 1gig line. It took six months (not for legals but for actual installation), didn't work properly for the first 3 weeks. It also cost 3 times more than the connection in London.

I would propose that it did exist as sort of a defacto state of the internet. Only in recent years have the telcos begun looking for revenue grown, leading them down the path of treating their subscriber base as some sort of resource to be bargained off to the highest content provider/bidder, while still charging large sums of money for the customer to have a connection.

Probably because it's easier to prevent the companies from abusing their position than it is to do something about the fact that the monopolies exist in the first place.

The former is a matter of defining a rule that says "If you do this, we will fine you or worse", where "this" is defined as various anti-competitive, anti-consumer practices.

The latter is a morass of legal wrangling (think ma bell getting broken up) that would have to repeat itself for every single major ISP out there.