Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt 26z
It's amazing that people can work online, yet not understand both sides of the net neutrality argument.
I've seen the cable TV tiers used as an example a thousand times, but that doesn't apply to the internet. There are multiple cable TV tiers because the cable companies license access from the networks based on subscriber count. They can't get access to broadcast every station without charging everyone $150+ a month. But not everyone wants to pay that, so they offer stripped down packages (thus lowering the licensing fees for the cable company) all the way down to $30 or whatever per month.
You aren't going to get online one day only to find out that Wikipedia is now in the "education tier" that costs $10 a month extra. ISPs do not pay licensing fees to any website.
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ISP's likely won't charge consumers directly for "tiers" or "packages." What they will do is charge website owners. Comcast could go to Pornhub and say, "Pay us $10 million per month or we will put your site in the "slow lane" and no matter how fast an internet connection your visitors have, it will load much slower than your competitions and make streaming video a challenge." Pornhub now has no choice but to pay them or risk losing a ton of visitors who will move on to faster-running sites.
Imagine if Comcast started up its own movie or music streaming service. They could just choose to put Netflix or Spotify in a "slow lane" so Comcast customers will choose their fast service over one of the slower ones.
Of course, all of these things could piss off customers and they will switch to an ISP that doesn't do that, but roughly 30% of the country only has one choice when it comes to broadband ISPs and many others only have two. If both are throttling, then you have no real choice.