A Dose of Reality on Net Neutrality

The Social Justice Wackos are at it again.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said Friday that he and President Obama agree on the importance of protecting net neutrality.

"My position is unchanged," FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said at a press conference. "The president and I agree—and have always agreed—on the importance of an open Internet."

But net-neutrality advocates responded that as long as Wheeler supports allowing large companies to pay for special "fast lanes" on the Internet, he and the president are miles apart. [emphasis added]

That's founded on a great big steaming load of codswallop sliding down your throat.

Net neutrality had always depended on a type of digital barter. Sometimes this is referred to as "in-kind" or "balanced" transport. In effect it means if you carry N terabytes of data from my network and I carry something close to the same from your network, we are in balance. If I expect you to carry my N terabytes of traffic but do not offer anything in return I am imposing costs on you without any corresponding benefit. I am using your bandwidth without giving anything in return.

These idiots seem to think that bandwidth is cheap or free. It is not and just because it is denominated in bytes instead of dollars does not change that. A backbone provider has to lay thousands of miles of fiber, buy very expensive switches and routers and hire highly-skilled engineers to keep it all working. What the SJWs are trying to do here is pervert a perfectly reasonable form of barter between carriers into some kind of entitlement for operations like Netflix. However, in any fair transaction, you must give at least as much as you receive or the distortions cause at least one of the parties in the transaction to close up shop.