the Awesome Highlighter

ISPs have plenty of good options There are good arguments to be made against orthodox “neutrality”, especially when they prevent ISPs from performing the kind of management functions that would naturally occur in a fully-competitive market, constrain reasonable pricing options. Such neutrality, though, is both unrealistic and unnecessary. If an ISP respects basic principles of network privacy, then the key benefits of neutrality remain. This is a position that network providers and consumers should both be able to live with.   In many countries outside of the United States, ISPs rarely offer truly unlimited usage. Usage caps or high-usage surcharges are the norm. This even applies when there is open access to the ISP business and multiple competitors. Nobody wants to subsidize a movie distribution business by hosting downloads on their $50/month subscribers’ home computers. But it doesn’t violate privacy if an ISP charges one price for actual backbone Internet access, while offering a lower price, or free downloads, of material hosted on its own servers. It may not be truly “neutral”, but why shouldn’t an ISP encourage users to seek out local (cheap to deliver) mirrors for popular content, rather than download it from halfway around the world?   So-called peer-to-peer applications encourage consumers to use their home computers as file servers. This can be very wasteful of ISP resources and violates some Terms of Service, though such terms are not exactly “neutral”. But the “P4P” initiative is working on providing peer applications with a way to look for local copies of content, on the same provider’s network, in order to minimize backbone Internet costs. There’s nothing wrong with giving end users an incentive to use it, such as by exempting these on-net packets from usage caps or overage charges.   remove