Around the Net

The Case Against Net Neutrality

Bandwidth hogs like Netflix need to pay their fair share of the costs associated with building and maintaining our telecommunications infrastructure.

So argue John Sununu and Harold Ford Jr. -- former U.S. Senator and congressman, respectively -- in MercuryNews.com. "Broadband networks are delivering more than just the latest sitcom episodes and hottest movies," they contend. "It hardly seems fair to make users of these services pay more in order to subsidize Netflix's costs of delivering their videos online."This call for a fairer pricing model and a more realistic long-term investment strategy has bipartisan support."

Netflix, as Sununu and Ford see it, argues that the marginal cost to the network providers of streaming a half-hour TV show to a residential customer is "one penny." Yet, "this ignores the hundreds of billions of dollars in sunken network investments needed to create that one-penny marginal cost efficiency at the customer's end," Sununu and Ford say. As such, "In 2010, the FCC said government policy should not discourage 'broadband providers from asking subscribers who use the network less to pay less, and subscribers who use the network more to pay more.'"

Read the whole story at San Jose Mercury News »

Next story loading loading..