Sure this is about trying to control the content but it goes even further than that. Karl has this nailed here. It WILL result in higher prices across the board AND will result in MORE monopolistic behavior by incumbents. Why? The barrier to entry is going to be so high it will be nearly impossible to enter the market financially.
You get what you deserve America.
You will get it. Long, hard, and dry.
Reed Hastings’ Netflix has largely driven the hysteria about Net Neutrality through one of the most-common means of misleading the public that the government itself is known to use all the time: Create a crisis, then screw you in “solving” it.
Netflix relies on very low-latency, high-speed data delivery over long periods of time to deliver its content to you. This is an entirely different business model than what has powered the Internet thus far. It is not an impossible business model, but it is a far more-expensive one to provide than the model used to date.
When you surf a web page the load is taken when the page loads, then there is little or no load while you read it. You click something, the process repeats.
But both video delivery “on-demand” and unsolicited advertising delivery, particularly video ads, don’t work under that model. The build requirements for that sort of operating model are far more expensive because instead of building for average load plus a margin you now must build for peak bitrate and be able to deliver that with predictable and small degrees of latency — a peak bitrate which may well be 2, 3, 5 or even 10x higher than average!
Note that unsolicited video ads are effectively spam — those that play on load, rather than on click, are particularly annoying in that they interrupt whatever you’re actually trying to do — and this is even worse when these ads involve soundtracks that autoplay along with them.
Netflix could have built out the infrastructure to deliver all those bits in a low-latency, high-speed form on their own. But that would have been extremely expensive, and in turn that would have made their $8/month “all you can eat” model impossible. So they didn’t — they shoved it off on other people.
They’re not the only ones. Facebook plays video content on-load, rather than on-demand, as well — particularly if it’s in the viewport. And again, that takes Facebook’s data requirement for “good” delivery upward. Someone has to pay for that and the entire point of this campaign is to make sure it’s you, and not Facebook, that pays.
Note again that Facebook charges advertisers for these ads, and now you will get saddled with the cost of delivering them, whether you want them or not.
It is manifestly unjust, and indeed outrageous, to allow this sort of cost-shifting to go on. It may be legal but it should be considered fraud. This is the false narrative being sold to you to support “Net Neutrality”, and it’s going to ram you right up the chute in the form of higher costs for your Internet connections whether you want to use Netflix and Facebook or not.
When, not if, you get rammed by this in your wallet I don’t want to hear the complaints. You are entitled in this country to be stupid and buy into the false narratives used by people who simply want to spam you and shift their costs onto you, but if you do and not only allow but pressure the government to “act” to confirm and cement these sorts of outrageous practices you had better not complain about the outcome later on because you begged for and in fact demanded the reaming you’re going to get.
via Net Neutrality Vote In The FCC: You Lose America in [Market-Ticker].