Dan Greenberg
Jul 30, 2017 · 1 min read

“ Even knowing that Google, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter have all successfully monetized ways to promote and suppress content and are still (humorously) the leaders of the the crusade for Net Neutrality”

That is one of the best phrases I’ve seen in a while!

And it says a lot. It says you actually understand what this is about. Net neutrality is a means of enabling and subsidizing the big tech companies at the expense of the ISPs… and that ultimately means I have to subsidize my neighbor who might consume GB per day from Netflix while I consume MB for email. And it means that it’s uneconomical to compete… or just plain uneconomical to serve… poor/rural communities. (The only thing worse in network economics than having to provide potentially GB to a lot of people is to have to provide potentially GB to a few people.)

But a key is to separate net neutrality between the consumer side and the producer side. On the consumer side, you can argue that access should be fair and unbiased. It’s a good argument. My neighbor should not be able to affect my access. On the producer side, however, we should have a mechanism to transfer some of the cost of serving otherwise uneconomical poor/rural areas with the bandwidth needed to the producers or distributors of the content that consumes that bandwidth. Without that, the cost is simply spread to other consumers… a subsidy to the Producers. An interconnect fee per bit accomplishes this… but it’s not cool to say that.

    Dan Greenberg

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    Seeking interesting business, and businesses, to develop. Please forgive occasional snark.