Yes, Your Internet Is Getting Slower

Your provider likes it that way. And the government doesn’t care.

By David Auerbach

David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer based in New York. His website is http://davidauerba.ch.

The ongoing battle over broadband network neutrality is confusing, and the stakes for consumers and businesses are high. What’s the worst that can happen if network neutrality doesn’t prevail? Yes, you will pay more for worse service, but just how bad will it get? To answer that complicated question, there’s one easy analogy available: the California energy crisis of 2000.

In the late 1990s, the deregulation of the California utilities—which forced them to sell off their power supplies to independent electricity wholesalers—proved to be a disaster. The magic hand of the market was supposed to bring down energy fees for all. What happened instead was that “efficient markets” turned out to be nothing of the sort. In 2000, market manipulation, artificial scarcity created by shutting down power plants to reduce supply, and deliberately inferior service resulted in blackouts and brownouts, an 800 percent rise in energy prices, and lucrative profiteering by Enron. Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric went bankrupt, and the whole crisis cost somewhere upward of $40 billion.

Electricity wholesalers such as Enron are akin to Internet service providers such as Time Warner and Comcast in important ways. The electricity wholesalers had incentives to starve the energy market in order to extract greater fees from utilities and consumers. ISPs have similar incentives to manipulate their bandwidth in order to extract fees from websites (such as Netflix and YouTube), as well as not build out any infrastructure that would make bandwidth cheaper or make your Internet faster.

Many customers are already living with a virtual Internet brownout.

This is, in fact, what is already happening. Ars Technica reports that gigabit broadband could easily become a reality, but the ISPs have no interest in pursuing that path. Instead, ISPs like Time Warner repeatedly try to switch to capped bandwidth plans, despite widespread customer opposition to what is basically price gouging. In the face of actual competition, they wouldn’t dare.

[...]

Continua qui: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/05/network_neutrality_dinosaurs_like_time_warner_and_at_t_have_nothing_to_worry.html