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Ask HN: What are the worst possible side-effects of net neutrality legislation?

11 points by ryandvm ↗ HN
We see a lot of posts about the need for network neutrality legislation. Warning that if it is not enacted we'll see things like raising the barrier to entry for startups, content gardens, billing content providers for access to consumers, etc.

While I find these issues compelling and worth worrying about, I'm also curious about some of the possible downsides of enacting net neutrality legislation.

What do you think are the worst plausible side-effects or unintended consequences enacting net neutrality legislation?

2 comments

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wmf
The main problem is likely to be cost. Net neutrality sets a minimum quality level for Internet service and there is a certain cost to provide that level of service. If you can't afford that then you don't get any Internet access at all.

This usually comes up in rural areas (cf. Brett Glass) or the developing world. In the Android One announcement it was mentioned that people in India are probably not willing to pay for metered data to download OS updates, so they would just never update unless Google pays for the bandwidth, which is what they are doing.

ef4
Net neutrality would give regulators significantly more power over how ISPs operate their networks. Due to regulatory capture[0], we can expect those regulators to advance the interests of entrenched players over potential newcomers.

So the biggest costs are probably Bastiat's "unseen" [1] costs. The things that could have been but never will. We may be helping lock in the ISP industry of 2014 as a permanent status quo.

I would argue that net neutrality is a shortsighted compromise. Instead of trying to make the monopolists be slightly less bad, we should be legalizing real competition for them.

For example, if the goal is really to improve service and reduce costs, we should be campaigning to legalize municipal networks at least as hard as people are campaigning for net neutrality. Why is net neutrality getting attention and these other barriers aren't? Because there are big commercial interests who benefit from net neutrality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture [1] http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html