Shopping is normally good for the economy, but not when the shoppers are net neutrality advocates looking for friendly deals on a regulatory forum. Policy makers in Michigan, their current target, should tell pro-regulatory activists to go home, with good reason.
Those who support net neutrality legislation frame themselves as proponents of the Net, but in reality their recommendations would have an anti-Internet effect. The worry is that network providers like AT&T or Comcast will start charging some Web sites more than others. It is true that network providers would like to charge high-traffic Web sites for their larger usage of the network, but it remains unclear why that would be wrong or unfair.
Voip.com, an Internet phone provider, is one of the corporations calling for government intervention. Without government oversight, it argues, “consumer-friendly applications like VoIP, online gaming, and streaming homegrown video would likely be squeezed out by the larger corporations that can afford to pay for unfettered service.”
It’s obvious that Voip.com is simply trying to avoid the risk of paying more for their network use, but the thing Voip.com’s executives have missed is that the Net is getting crowded. If network operators can’t recoup their costs for the higher bandwidth use, then the network will slow down for everyone and services like VoIP, online gaming, and streaming video won’t work so well anymore.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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