Worst case scenario for no net neutrality?

[treis]

@Slash1972

I’ve already agreed to disagree on the ISP competition front, but come on. You seriously think that starting a web site where people upload videos has an order of magnitude higher barrier to entry than starting a new ISP? Really?

Creating some half baked site that no one uses is easy. Creating something that rivals Youtube isn’t. Again, look at SnapChat. They are 3-4 billion in the hole and are burning cash at a rate of just under a billion a year. From what I can tell, that’s more cash than Google spent on Fiber.

[treis]

@HMS_Irruncible

OK, let’s play along with this. Net neutrality is abolished. Amazon doesn’t like Comcast throttling traffic between AWS and subscribers, so it decides to become a residential ISP.

But remember, AWS itself is also an internet subscriber. When AWS gets throttled communicating to its peers, how can Amazon respond? Do they create their own backbones? Do they create Amazon Telecommunications? Are you excited about the prospect of having to know which of your websites are on the Amazon Internet and which ones aren’t? Do you understand everything this entails?

Peering agreements aren’t governed by Net Neutrality so this scenario isn’t relevant.

[k9bfriender]

@treis

Creating some half baked site that no one uses is easy. Creating something that rivals Youtube isn’t. Again, look at SnapChat. They are 3-4 billion in the hole and are burning cash at a rate of just under a billion a year. From what I can tell, that’s more cash than Google spent on Fiber.

All you have to do to make something that rivals youtube is to make a better product.

Youtube is huge, and has a massive market share, so it has that going for it, but f you come up with something superior, then it can take off and leave youtube in its wake.

As it is difficult to sometimes find interesting things on youtube, a different video service with a better more intuitive search and recommendation system would have people switching in short order. It is not much work to type in “betterthanyoutube.com” than “youtube.com”, so customers shifting is just based on marketing of a better product, not on any other forms of barrier to entry. Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat down your door, build a better youtube, and people will type its URL into their browser. You tube certainly has inertia in its market share, but it is not a monopoly in that, with the current net neutrality set up, there is nothing stopping a better product competing.

Creating a new ISP has a few other minor things involved, like running a physical cable to each and every one of your subscribers, as well as the hardware to set all that up, permission and leasing from the owners of the telephone poles, and head ends for each city/area. Then you need to get people to switch form their current ISP to yours, and while you may be providing services to amazon and netflix, they need to keep their original ISP to get to cbs, abc, msnbc, even fox.

[Slash1972]

@k9bfriender

Creating a new ISP has a few other minor things involved, like running a physical cable to each and every one of your subscribers, as well as the hardware to set all that up, permission and leasing from the owners of the telephone poles, and head ends for each city/area. Then you need to get people to switch form their current ISP to yours, and while you may be providing services to amazon and netflix, they need to keep their original ISP to get to cbs, abc, msnbc, even fox.

You know what is 10 times harder than this? Registering a domain name and purchasing cloud hosting and storage from AWS that expands as your user base grows

[Saint_Cad]

@HMS_Irruncible

But remember, AWS itself is also an internet subscriber. When AWS gets throttled communicating to its peers, how can Amazon respond?

But throttling THEIR competitors causing Apple iSP to be created - who throttle THEIR competitors causing the creation of youISPtube - who throttle THEIR competitors causing …

Well you get the picture.

[asahi]

@Saint_Cad

Why do I have the feeling that without net neutrality that it will result in ad popups on your computer if you want the ISP services.

I think that’s what it will come down to. Consumers will probably be allowed to keep their ‘free’ internet in theory, but the Comcasts of the world are going to require advertising access and the right to spy and record your every online move so that they can get an idea of what you’re likely to buy. This will only get worse as they start pushing their own versions of smart devices for your home (Alexa, Home, Smart TVs etc). You’ll have to pay – probably handsomely – to opt out. It’s no coincidence that Ajit Pai, the anti Net Neutrality FCC chair, has also taken a hammer to consumer privacy protections.

[asahi]

@treis

It becomes worth it if Comcast starts charging their users to access Amazon.

I doubt it would be worth it even then. Amazon would have to invest some serious resources that it would much rather invest in its core business, without any real guarantee that it could compete in that business of delivering communications. See, that’s the problem. You’re asking Amazon to fundamentally change how it operates as a very successful business all so that it can solve a problem of having a reliable medium to reach its customers. And just what if consumers don’t respond to Amazon the ISP? What if some new technology comes along that makes their investment unnecessary? What if Amazon spends so much of its time and energy on its ISP infrastructure that it makes its core business weaker? The risk is too great.

It’s probably a better strategy to coordinate a grass roots strategy with other tech companies – maybe an internet blackout day or week where we can’t use Google, Bing, Amazon, or Apple for a few days. Or maybe they could ‘throttle’ themselves to show consumers what the post-neutrality world looks like.