{"id":26825,"date":"2014-07-15T07:41:57","date_gmt":"2014-07-15T12:41:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26825"},"modified":"2014-07-15T07:41:57","modified_gmt":"2014-07-15T12:41:57","slug":"the-economic-side-of-net-neutrality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/07\/15\/the-economic-side-of-net-neutrality\/","title":{"rendered":"The economic side of Net Neutrality"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Forbes<\/em>, Tim Worstall<\/a> ignores the slogans to follow the money in the Net Neutrality argument:<\/p>\n

The FCC is having a busy time of it as their cogitations into the rules about net neutrality become the second most commented upon in the organisation\u2019s history (second only to Janet Jackson\u2019s nip-slip which gives us a good idea of the priorities of the citizenry). The various internet content giants, the Google<\/em>s, Facebook<\/em>s and so on of this world, are arguing very loudly that strict net neutrality should be the standard. We could, of course attribute this to all in those organisations being fully up with the hippy dippy idea that information just wants to be free. Apart from the obvious point that Zuckerberg, for one, is a little too young to have absorbed that along with the patchouli oil we\u2019d probably do better to examine the underlying economics of what\u2019s going on to work out why people are taking the positions they are.<\/p>\n

Boiling \u201cnet neutrality\u201d down to its essence the argument is about whether the people who own the connections to the customer, the broadband and mobile airtime providers, can treat different internet traffic differently. Should we force them to be neutral (thus the \u201cneutrality\u201d part) and treat all traffic exactly the same? Or should they be allowed to speed up some traffic, slow down other, in order to prioritise certain services over others?<\/p>\n

We can (and many do) argue that we the consumers are paying for this bandwidth so it\u2019s up to us to decide and we might well decide that they cannot. Others might (and they do) argue that certain services require very much more of that bandwidth than others, further, require a much higher level of service, and it would be economically efficient to charge for that greater volume and quality. For example, none of us would mind all that much if there was a random second or two delay in the arrival of a gmail message but we\u2019d be very annoyed if there were random such delays in the arrival of a YouTube<\/em> packet. Netflix<\/em> would be almost unusable if streaming were subject to such delays. So it might indeed make sense to prioritise such traffic and slow down other to make room for it.<\/p>\n

You can balance these arguments as you wish: there\u2019s not really a \u201ccorrect\u201d answer to this, it\u2019s a matter of opinion. But why are the content giants all arguing for net neutrality? What\u2019s their reasoning?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As you’d expect, it all comes down to the money. Who pays more for what under a truly “neutral” model and who pays more under other models. The big players want to funnel off as much of the available profit to themselves as possible, while others would prefer the big players reduced to the status of regulated water company: carrying all traffic at the same rate (which then allows the profits to go to other players).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Forbes, Tim Worstall ignores the slogans to follow the money in the Net Neutrality argument: The FCC is having a busy time of it as their cogitations into the rules about net neutrality become the second most commented upon in the organisation\u2019s history (second only to Janet Jackson\u2019s nip-slip which gives us a good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,25,15],"tags":[391,328,58,661,481],"class_list":["post-26825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-economics","category-technology","tag-facebook","tag-google","tag-internet","tag-regulation","tag-youtube"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6YF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26825"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26826,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26825\/revisions\/26826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}